Drones in science and industry – a career opportunity?

My thoughts and experience at WISA Talks: Drones in Science and Industry

I am in the last year of the Geography and Environmental Management in Geomatics program at Waterloo. I originally enrolled in the course GEOG 270- Knowledge Requirements of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) as my fun interesting elective. Through participating in the WISA Talks: Drones in Science and Industry session, it transformed my perspective of drones into something more than that: a potential career path.  

Since I am graduating soon, I’ve started a self-reflection journey in exploring what I would like to do in the future. For me, working in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within a government organization was the default and the most straightforward path – key word having been ‘was’.

The perspectives and the diverse industry use of drones that I heard from participating in the WISA Talks, changed my mind. Five different industry professionals and four different drone businesses introduced me to what it would mean to have a career in the drone industry. The two most memorable were the presentations from the consulting firm GHD and a drone consulting firm Terresky. Ryan Rizzo’s, CEO of Terresky, presentation had amazing drone images of whales in the St. Lawrence River, downtown Toronto, and cool bridges across Canada. It is so easy to take amazing and impactful visuals when you work with drones! While it looked impressive, what interested me the most was the data analysis and the processing mentioned in Omar Dzinic’s presentation from GHD. The analysis of spatial data that I have done has been on datasets already created or from satellite imagery. But, with drones, I can picture myself in a role where I would be part of the collection, processing, and the analysis. This possiblity excites me because I would be involved in the full lifecycle of a drone project.   

The drone industry is new, it’s exciting and being part of the course opened the door to the possibilities my geomatics degree could take me, and the WISA Talk showed me what could be possible in new career fields within a new and growing drone industry.